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Chris Hedges: Joe Biden’s parting gift to America will be Christian fascism
A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump: the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, and the Democratic Party. Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches.
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A moral crossroads for the West
If Netanyahu is facing his Rubicon, the West has finally arrived at its own moral crossroads. After months of uncritical support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and weeks of equivocation as the magnitude of its inhumanity has become undeniable, there is still time to draw back from the abyss and defend the post-war order whose highest legal authority is the ICJ.
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The four horsemen of Gaza’s apocalypse
Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East—Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk—have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East.
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The global crisis of representation intensifies
The fates of electoralism and militarism are entwined. In conditions of renewed cold war, the choices on offer and the potential range of policies and programmes are constrained by national security considerations and the shifting alignments of bloc politics. The voice of constituencies who believe that peace and development should be the priority remain unrepresented.
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Canada has gone from complicity through silence to active participation in genocide
The international community has two paths towards normalizing shipping through the Red Sea: intervene to stop an ongoing genocide, or intervene by punishing a country already devastated by decades of Western interventionism and war in the hopes that it will force their military to disengage. That choice seems like an obvious one.
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Lee Sun-kyun’s death is a reminder of the lie of South Korean liberalism
“China” is often the subject of Western ire, or at least the exaggerated “China” we’re sold by mainstream Western media, explains Jack Daniel Christie, but few in this part of the world ever turn their attention towards South Korea, a nation that seems to get by in the popular Western imagination with a cursory identification as a “liberal democracy.”
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Gaza and the fault lines of empire
US hegemony is by no means as robust as it used to be, threatened as it is by the rising power of China. Though the global empire can rely on an unrivalled military power and a great capacity for economic coercion, a functioning Washington Consensus requires a minimum level of acquiescence and stability and this is being threatened by the present situation.
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Batchoun: US ceasefire veto devoid of humanity
With the United States vetoing a call for a ceasefire at the United Nations Security Council, the collective West has stood by and condoned Israel’s continued barbarity. This amounts to complicity in war crimes. The callous disregard for Palestinian rights and human lives paints a bleak view of humanity, one that is devoid of hope and redemption. We must fight for better.
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Our collective trauma is the road to tyranny
The endemic trauma in American society, which is getting worse under the onslaught of the gig economy, pronounced social inequality, the climate crisis and the seizure of the political process and most institutions by corporations and the ruling oligarchs, is our most serious public health crisis. It has grave individual, social and political consequences.
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Fissures in the global order mean both risks and opportunities
Cracks in the US-EU alliance could mean political openings for the working classes living in the West as well as in Global South nations. In a world facing climate catastrophe, skyrocketing levels of inequality, the threat of more war and even a nuclear war, the costs of missing any such opportunity would be nothing short of tectonic.